In Syracuse,poets, scheduled to read their work within the Federal Building were turned away at the door,their permit deniedin accordance with a nationwide orange alert.

To get inside, they would have to removeall loose change,and incendiary devicessuch as metaphor and ironyand dissentfrom their pockets,and walk through the security gate.
"Don't fret," said the smiling man with the silver star,
"You can read your poems in the snow,
in Clinton Square."

In the public squarea blast of foreign arctic airbrought whiteout conditionsto those who remained to speak,unafraid of whatever might fall out of the sky.

Through the storm, A delegation of the Literacy Council was escorted through the security checkpoint.The first lady throughwas prepared to speak with her representative about the virtues of reading the classics,and to request great works of metered versein which the form was what mattered,in which visions of home and land were made clever with little deviceslike rhyming "kettle" with "metal".

"Oh, for the days when poetry was free of political poses!
When was that?" the first lady wondered aloud.
Was it Whitman who crashed the tea party?
Or Emerson?
Keats was a drunkard,
or was it Yeats?
Surely it was sometime before
the beatniks' foul mouths and conga drums.
"Still, there are true gentle artists even now.
Jack Frost had the decency to just talk about snow,"
she said,
"and horses,
and farmhouses,
and a fence."
She and the representative agreed
that the Psalms were quite enough for them.

Below, forming a circle in the square,
the protesting poets had nothing to burn for warmth,but observed that the old worn flag had been taken from the public squareto be replaced with fabric more fresh, without such a history of blowing in the wind.

In the basement of the Federal Building,as the old flag was incinerated,blue and white were transformedto an alarming yellow and orange.Even the red became darker, like blood full of air from excited lungs, then a final change to dark ashand invisible vapor,rising through the Federal Building to warm its workers from the winter outside.